How much lies beneath that deceptively simple word, the ‘sea’,

in truth a continuous

roiling evolving drama of a billion waves, each one of individual character and rhythm.

Up in the cliffs is a cross section through the earth’s autobiography: bands of sandstone,

siltstone and shale dating back to the Upper Carboniferous period, 300 million years ago.

How long it took for us to make it here.

The sea’s rage and threatening power invites us to a redemptive sense of our own smallness

and fragility: a bracing vastness that calms and dampens our petty fears and egoisms.

- the indifference of nature as a relief from being ourselves.

There are gulls overhead and large colonies of razorbills along the perilous cliff-face ledges.

Every day they head out eighty miles or more, diving 25 meters deep in to the Atlantic,

in search of sprats, cod and herring:

our varied co-inhabitants in this otherwise deserted,

gaseous universe.

We are part of all this.

We should no longer say 'I' and 'they' - but we. We should surrender our jealous, frightened

attachment to the human perspective - and learn at times to merge with the universe,

to identify with its vast, impersonal forces.

We are the waters, the sky, the land, the currents.

At night, as we fall asleep, we can hear the sea seemingly pulsing through our ears, our veins.

A little of nature’s energy is inside all of us - and will continue its relentless beat

when we are exhausted and gone, having left less of a mark even than the tiny trapped

corals and brachiopods in the rocks; mere frenzied instants in eternity.